Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) (28 page)

I reached out, stroking my finger down her cheek, over her lips, and we stared at each other. It was clear I was on the prowl, but I didn’t think either of us knew what I wanted.

Her face in my hands, I kissed her, my tongue moving between her teeth, begging her for all the things she held back. I didn’t care how much my jaw hurt; I just wanted to feel her, to own her tonight. She wrapped her hands around my coat, pulled me inside, and slammed the door. My hands were under her clothes within a heartbeat, and her skin, her sighs, her scent—they were the balm I required to feel whole again.

“I love that you’re naked under this,” I murmured against her mouth.

“If that’s what you like, I’ll stop buying fancy panties,” she whispered. She unfastened my belt, drew my zipper down, and pressed her palm over my cock, and if she asked me right then whether I liked her daily game of Make Matt Beg, I would have said yes. It was so simple, her hand on my body, but it leveled me every time.

“Don’t…don’t do that,” I said. “Fancy panties are nice, too.”

No need to mention I considered arriving at her door with a pair in my hand. This probably wasn’t the time to discuss the pussy necklace in my pocket either. I didn’t leave the house without it.

Clothes landed in piles around us, and I pulled her to the velvet sofa, settling her on my lap. She was damp and ready, and I couldn’t keep my mouth away from her nipples and I wanted her like this—always. I wanted this place we created where she stopped caring about everything else, where the only thing that mattered was how we fit together, where we could get lost in each other. This was what I wanted.

Burying my face in her hair, I murmured filthy words about her ass, her tits, her pussy, about wanting my fuck toy, my dirty little slut. And the tension riding my nerves subsided as I breathed her in.

She responded, I knew she did, but I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t interpret anything she said. I knew only the rhythm of her body, her skin against my mine. Her nails scratched along my scalp and shoulders, and I was there, pressing into her, and I couldn’t think past the frenzied hunger in my head. I filled her with one thrust, groaning her name as I bottomed out.

I closed my eyes, focusing on Lauren’s musical sighs and reminding myself to be gentle. My hands clamped on her hips, my fingers digging grooves into her skin, and we crashed into each other. Her mouth mapped my chest and arms and jaw, and I wanted more than the warm, wet sensations she left behind. Bites and scratches weren’t enough; I wanted her fingerprints tattooed on my skin. I wanted something that would be there tomorrow.

“Tell me what you want,” I panted.

“What you’re doing. That. More. Harder.”

Grasping Lauren’s free hand, I placed it between us. “Touch yourself.”

I watched as her fingers skittered over her clit. I felt the difference immediately, her tissues turning molten, her skin flushing, and her breaths coming rapidly.

Nothing separated us but it wasn’t enough for me. I needed more, a type of
more
I didn’t believe I’d be able to quantify, and I lifted Lauren’s hand to my mouth. I gazed into her emerald eyes, searching for the flecks of gold while I sucked her arousal from her fingers.

“Tell me what you want,” I whispered.

“I want you to come on my—”

“No,” I said. “No. Tell me what you
want
.”

She dropped her head to my shoulder, evading, rocking faster and faster until the pulses of her orgasm rolled over my shaft, her walls clamped around me, and she cried out against my neck. I lived for the soft whimpers and moans that heralded her orgasms, and I wanted them to exist in a secret place that only I knew.

“Tell me,” I repeated, and it sounded all wrong—demanding, yet desperate.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just want you.”

Pumping into her, my orgasm barreled down my spine, snapping my corded muscles and wiping every thought from my mind but one: Lauren. I spoke mindless obscenities into her lips and neck and hair, stopping just before I revealed everything else I wanted.

Lauren lifted her head, and before her lips brushed over my battered jaw, her eyes flashed to mine, anxious and confused and so fucking beautiful. She was all sweet kisses and tiny purring whimpers, and as I sensed myself hardening again, I led her to the bedroom and buried myself in her until we fell asleep.

I woke up around four-thirty, and I stared at her in the blue morning darkness, seeing everything she wouldn’t say. She slept with her head on my chest, her legs twisted between mine, and her hand over my heart, and I wanted it to be enough.

I knew it wasn’t.

LAUREN

“Y
ou think I
could pull off this look?” Shannon’s elbow grazed my arm, and she handed off the magazine featuring an assortment of long skirts. “I can rock pencil skirts every day of the week, but those are tough for me.” She gestured to her frame. “This height doesn’t work with everything.”

Too lost in my own thoughts and pedicure-induced bliss to think critically about her question, I nodded and handed the magazine back. “Yeah, definitely try.”

“Are you crazy? Those skirts are the exclusive domain of nuns and peasants,” Sam snapped. He tore the magazine from Shannon’s hands and sent me an irritable glare. “And if there’s one thing you’re not, Shan, it’s a nun.”

“What about weekends?” she asked. “I could wear one of those jersey skirts to brunch or the market, or,” she gestured to the nail salon, “out for a Saturday afternoon pedi.”

Sam shifted in his massage chair and rolled his eyes. “Who do you think you are? Stevie Nicks? Stop it with the long skirts, short girl.”

They continued arguing about skirts while I paged through a dated copy of
Real Simple
.

Our regular pedicure program usually focused on the important stuff: Shannon’s disasters in dating, new fashion trends never intended for petite women, and whether high heels were actually screwing up our feet. We’d touch on the friends of our twenties who were flocking toward marriage, babies, and suburbia, and our refusal to live beyond the reach of the T subway lines, and the infrequency with which we truly unplugged from our hectic careers.

Shannon and I were built alike. We shared a bone-deep dedication to our work, the belief we’d each be unstoppable if we put in enough hours, and the fuzzy faith that we’d be able to postpone our lives—that was, the actual living portions—for a few more years.

Sam joined us occasionally, and when he wasn’t busy crafting that manwhore façade, he was comical and fascinatingly neurotic, and on his way to becoming one of my new best friends.

Shannon considered the skirts again and snapped a photo of the page with her phone. “It’s not like I have time for shopping anyway,” she mumbled.

“You’re not too busy,” Sam said. “No one is ever too busy for anything. It’s a matter of priorities.”

The world through his eyes was linear and ordered, and everything fit into proper, square compartments. It was only a matter of moving those little boxes around and making it all fit. He worked long hours but when he left the office, the office left him. Calls went to voicemail, emails waited until the next morning. It was that easy for Sam.

There was even a tidy compartment for women. He wasn’t especially forthcoming with details, but it was clear he subscribed to the ‘you sucking my dick in a bathroom stall doesn’t require me to learn your name’ dogma. Seeing him here, his jeans rolled up to his knees, an oatmeal skin treatment painted on his calves, and a heated argument about skirts underway, I couldn’t imagine the same man as a cavalier player.

He went out most nights, hitting all the see-and-be-seen spots. He received invites to the swankiest events and sipped whiskey from the comfort of VIP lounges, and his name appeared in Boston’s gossip and society pages alongside socialites and local celebrities. And yet I knew he was more insecure than most tween girls.

Shannon turned toward me with a grin. “I’m reprioritizing. Want to go shopping? No, better idea: let’s shop and then hit Bin 26 for wine. I’ve been lusting over a new white blend.”

“I am not interested in any of that,” he muttered.

I tugged my scarf over my chest at the memory of Matthew’s teeth on my breasts early this morning, his voice hoarse after hours of growling when he said, “Nick and I are biking to the Vermont border and back, and I want to see you tonight. I want you in this bed, all naked and fuckable, all night. Tell me you’ll be right here when I get home.”

I glanced up at Shannon. “Maybe for a bit. I have some work to do, and I have plans with Matthew.”

Of course I agreed to his demands. Growly, bitey Matthew was irresistible, and despite my attempts at moderation, at taking care of me, at focusing on work, we always ended up together, night after night.

“Why do you call him that?” Sam asked. “Matthew. We only call him that when he’s in trouble.”

“Well…” I started, rewinding to those first moments we shared. I’d always called him Matthew. I didn’t think much about the structure and definition of us, but calling him Matthew was part of our foundation. It went hand-in-hand with my obscene requests and his cavemanning, and it wasn’t something we could explain to anyone else. “I like it, and so does he.”

Sam shrugged, considering my response for a moment, and then returned to the latest edition of
Dwell
.

Things were changing, that I knew. The days were shorter, air crisper, trees barer, but it wasn’t only the slide of autumn into winter. There was something inside me—something elemental—and it was shifting at a pace I couldn’t comprehend. At first I thought it was immediate, and quite possibly attributable to hiring Drew the Dean and off-loading a chunk of my overdue action items to him. I then realized it was most likely a gradual change, quiet yet invasive, like vines crawling around the slats of a fence, twisting and knotting and spreading until the two were indistinguishable, inseparable, indivisible.

I didn’t know whether I was the vine or the fence.

In the hushed moments when his head was nestled between my breasts or on my belly or just a breath from my center, we revealed softly spoken truths about everything before
us
. He seemed glee-filled to know I could count my lovers on one hand, not including the thumb or pinkie. It was his brand of cavemanish pride, something tangled up with possession and purity, and I accepted it without further analysis. He nudged me for some explanation of why my number was so low, but I offered few details and he didn’t push further.

I harbored a spoonful of silly triumph after discovering Matthew’s past relationships were cut from the friends-with-benefits cloth. When I pried, he mentioned never liking anyone enough to want more than basic fucking. He also referenced how, ahem,
vocal
I was in the bedroom, saying, “The minute I saw you, I thought ‘naughty schoolteacher.’ Turns out, I really dig the naughty part.”

We called it casual, we told our friends and families it was casual, we carried on with our lives as if it was casual, but it was powerful—
magnetic
—and the language necessary to describe what was happening to us hadn’t been invented yet.

And I wanted Matthew. I wanted to claim the notches and grooves around his collarbones and throat as my private hideaway, and I wanted the growls, bites, and sweat, and the tender heart he so diligently worked at hiding. But as much as I wanted to tell him everything, those words didn’t flow like my obscene demands. The only adequate method of communication was rough, profane sex, and I had to believe he knew what I was thinking and feeling.

*

We huddled against
the bone-chilling wind, too cold to talk, hurrying through the narrow Boston streets, our shopping bags slapping against our legs, until we arrived at the wine bar. We settled into a narrow table looking out onto Boston Common, and a waiter delivered menus and a small bowl of olives.

“There’s a bottle I really want to try. Is that okay with you?” Shannon asked.

“I do not discriminate. You know what I like, and you know the wine in my glass is my favorite kind.”

Shannon ordered an Australian white blend, and it wasn’t long before it was empty and we were sampling something new.

“So I invited Matt’s friend Nick to dinner next week,” Shannon said. “Those eyes. Swoons. I’d like to bite his ass. At least lick it.”

I wanted to ask why the Walshes were such biters, but exploring that path with Shannon seemed unwise. My brothers’ sex lives were not one of my preferred discussion topics, and I had to believe Shannon shared that position. “Does he know that?”

“I’ve been forthcoming with those interests. He’s less excited about the ass biting than I am.”

“You’re sure I can’t bring anything?”

I was looking forward to Thanksgiving at Shannon’s next week. It was a new chapter for me, and I liked hanging out with the Walshes. I doubted I’d encounter any vegan green bean casseroles with this crew, but I was excited about the butternut squash pie. A strange new sentimental part of me recognized this as my first coupled holiday, and that knowledge filled me with a twinge of giddy anxiety.